Create The Market

Ashley Wilson didn't name her category in a marketing session. She heard customers say the word "orchestration," claimed it publicly, and held the line until Forrester put it on a Wave two years later.

Tyler Denk was 24, employed at Google, sitting in his parents' basement with 49 cents in his bank account and ten months of nights and weekends behind him.He also had a few thousand people on Twitter who'd been watching him build the whole time.Everyone he respected said email was dead. Substack had won. MailChimp had just sold for $12 billion, which everyone read as the category closing.Tyler launched Beehiiv anyway. Today: $30M ARR, 50,000 active senders, 10 billion emails delivered. He's saying it's just starting.

Anis Bennaceur built an AI-native sales intelligence platform that made a category king irrelevant — not by outspending them, but by building for an era Gong wasn't designed for.

This is the first edition of Create the Market — conversations with founders who aren't competing for existing demand. They're building demand that didn't exist before.Patrick Thompson, co-founder of Clarify, walked away from a comfortable lifeat Amplitude, second kid on the way, because he saw a $280B categorythat hadn't had a genuine rethink in decades. Two years in, his customers areposting on LinkedIn that they haven't updated their CRM in three months.Not by accident. By design.